Summer So Far

 It's the second full week of second break and it's been a good start to the season.   The weather has been beautiful.   We even had a few cool mornings and we were able to stay at the pool during the noon-three o'clock hour without even breaking a sweat one day!

Soak it up kids!   I made an effort in an attempt to celebrate the Last Day of School.   This is as fun and creative as I'll probably get all summer, so enjoy!

Streamers on the door.   The wrong side, really, for effect, but they still liked it:)

A basket of summer goodies awaited them, just beyond the streamers.

I bought a copy of the Williams-Sonoma cookbook for children.   Worth.Every. Penny.   The recipes are delicious, fresh, and arranged in a simple format that is easy to read.   Emmeline has made three of the recipes and has plans to try her fourth tomorrow for lunch.

Easy to follow, attractively arranged recipes.   I wanted a cookbook with good recipes, not just a lot of opening cans or bags.

There has been plenty of grapes, ice cream, fruit bars, and WATERMELON.

 We've gone to the neighborhood pool almost every day.  I didn't grow up going to pools on a regular basis.   We lived in the country and our pond had water moccasins.   So much for swimming in the pond.   I'm slowly getting used to the pool routine.   Wet towels have only been left in the car once.

The only sour note has been my backache.   I haven't had pain that lasted longer than a day or two since the first year after my back surgery, more than fourteen years ago.   Sitting is painful, so I try to keep moving, although I've had to find relief at times by lying on my side.   It did give me the chance to finish the third book in Pat Barker's World War I trilogy, The Ghost Road.   Yesterday, I started Delta Wedding, by Eudora Welty.   It has done my Delta heart good, especially this beautiful description of the landscape viewed from the window of the train known as The Yellow Dog:

And then, as if a hand reached along the green ridge and all of a sudden pulled down with a sweep, like a scoop in the bin, the hill and every tree in the world and left cotton fields, the Delta began...The land was perfectly flat and level but it shimmered like the wing of a lighted dragonfly. It seemed strummed, as though it were an instrument and something had touched it. Sometimes in the cotton were trees with one, two, or three arms--she could draw better trees than those were.

It is a perfect description of the views from my car window on so many drives.

I hope your summer is going along well:)